It seems I was successful in that goal. — Jeremiah

If so, your goals are easily satisfied. No offence meant.

You are probably aware that European culture was driving people insane in the 20th century -- WWI, WWII... Europe's craziness doesn't make anybody else's craziness better, but it can give you some perspective.

Does American culture drive people insane? Fromm thought so (The Sane Society, Erich Fromm). — Bitter Crank

While there certainly were some specific problems with European culture as a whole throughout the late 19th and early 20th century (Vienna was as much a great cultural center as a fulcrum of depression and suicide), but the mass sociopathy explanation of WWI and WWII was what Milgram wanted (and imho did) demonstrate to be false through his research.

However, I have no intention of spending time trying to determine which individuals fit where in those categories. — Jeremiah

Then what are your intentions, except perhaps presenting yourself as a "lover of truth" ?

I don't keep such lists and it is the lovers of opinion that are limiting themselves. The very nature of overindulgence in subjectivity is to limit everything to the self. — Jeremiah

So you admonish and pontificate, but you can't tell us who these "bad philosophers" are? Seems like you really want us to think you are quite the slayer of strawmen, although why I couldn't fathom.

He arose from global angst. His thought was global revolution. Others imagined attacking the problem one small piece at a time. The names of the moderates are not as well known, but they won in the end. Look at China's economy for proof of that. — frank

Have you red the Capital? Or any other of his economic texts?

And no, modern China is about as Imperialistic a country as any of the other powers. Marx nowadays might have prefered modern capitalist (read north-american exc. Mexico and Western European) to Chinese Communism based solely on the degree of social mobility being somewhat higher in the formers than the later.

The capitalism of Marx's days was a beast to be slain. Such beasts still exists today, and others have grown (like Google) that needs slayin'. Marx is still relevant.

If it was merely a goodwill gesture — frank

What else could it be? It's not Trojan Horse waiting to disgorge an army of chinese contortionnists...

China could have chosen a statue that wouldn't have resulted in protest marches in Germany. — frank

Why would China care for that?

I'm sure the Chinese know Marx is a controversial figure. — frank

Not so controversial for anyone with an historical, economical or philosophical education, or someone who hasn't had their mind rotten by the american school system.

Was Marx a great intellectual in your view? — frank

Yes, indubitably. You don't have to shill for someone to recognize that he is one of the great ones.

Really? If it was meant as a symbol of a bond between Germany and China, why not a Beethoven statue? I sense something other than plain good will. — frank

Really? What's the shared history of China and Beethoven (besides the trillion of great chinese pianists?). Perhaps are you just having too much of a hard time wrapping your head around the idea that for many, Marx was a great intellectual (and not Leftist-Hitler)?

... because Marx is a German author, and his influence on the history of the last century exceeds the influence of any single book ever written, with the exception of the Bible or perhaps the Koran.

Yes, Marx is Modern Jesus. Deal with it. :cool:

No one is suggesting "one single model" for anything; however, if your statement is that there is bad philosophy then you must have reasons for thinking that. So then, what are the characteristics of "bad philosophy"? — Jeremiah

think a characteristics of bad philosophy is over generalizations and giving up before before even trying. — Jeremiah

HexHammer is right, there are a lot of lovers of opinion that masquerade as philosophers, — Jeremiah

If we ask you who these philosophers are, my guess is that the list you'll provide will feature predominantly philosophers belonging to a single tradition. Since you mentioned "a love of opinion", "maintaining a fluid form" and your preferences for science, it's not too much of a stretch to assume that you'd put a lot of Continentals on that list of "bad philosophers". So in effect, you likely are trying to impose "one single model".

Often, philosophers who maintain a fluid form do so out of a principled positioning against objectivism or some other ~ism. By taking such a narrow stance toward the methodology of philosophy, you restrict the practice, its history and its future.

You are conflating self-defense (something that is necessary for survival) and eating meat (something that is NOT necessary for survival). — chatterbears

Apo is clearly trolling you. He likes to disguise the vapidity and trollishness of his replies in an endless word-jumble that he'll inevitably say you don't understand anyways.

When the argument requires you to consider the cannibalism of autistic human as a limit-case, then you know you are fighting a battle that can only be won by not participating.

As the story is written in first-person, I can only go by what the protagonist explains and I think that since she is consistently unsure about what he is thinking, that underlying intuitive response telling her that 'he could be a murderer' or that he has no cats etc, is telling of the authenticity of her actual motivations, that she really is afraid. — TimeLine

I think it's telling that these thoughts pop-up in the text, in each situation, in context in which she put herself willingly and was actually looking forward to up until something made her uncomfortable. Basically she was fine as long as her expectations were met.

You are right that this is telling of the authenticity of her motivations, but not that this display some form of fear on her end. It just shows that she was no more authentic in her willingness to open herself and engage another in a relationship. Her retreat to safety was this move to "maybe his a murderer - lol - not really", which saved her from having to realize that she's as guilty of playing games as he is.

From the perspective given, what we have here, are 2 rather introverted individuals who are stuck in their own prisonner-dilemma scenario, unwilling to admit that reciprocated vulnerability is the cost for the possibility of a relationship.

Hmm, interesting... So then the person must allow encroachment on his/her property if it was previously allowed, which then causes a loss of ownership. Seems like a good reason to not be tolerant. — Lone Wolf

It's more complicated than that. The most common situation in which legal tolerance are recognized occurs when a property is completely locked in by other properties, with no access to a road. This happens a lot with the old familial domains we had that are sub-sub-subdivided each time someone in the family decides to have spawns.

A few generation down the road, the new owner of one of the locking properties decides to renovate his house and as a result blocks the access to the locked property, simply by building on his own land. Locked proprietor brings locking proprietor to court to have his tolerance recognized, and thus forces the other guy to cancel his renovation.

This does not affect the rights of property of the owner, because if the owner can prove that the tolerance affects his normal usage of the property, he can get the tolerance revoked. On the other hand, prescription can : if someone uses a property in an open and licit way for a certain amount of time (something like 10 for land and 4 for everything else), and the rightful owner fails to contest the usage, then he can loses the property altogether. The point of legal prescription is that land and property are meant to be used for the good of private and public interests, not to be put down on a deed and ignored until it can be flipped.

More philosophically (but there is nothing more philosophical than Law!) perhaps, the traditional opposite to tolerance is not respect, but alterity.

Tolerance is the allowance of an act of behaviour of which we do not approve. It is an essentially the neutralization of a negative attitude toward the Other.

Alterity is the allowance of the Other as another. It's the constant neutralization of the pulsion which leads to us having to tolerate anything and everything, because it's the neutralization of that which always try to understand the Other as the Same.

Tolerance is not the same as respect, although respect can have aspects of tolerance. This must be the restraint of negativity in order to avoid conflict or harming another, not necessarily due to benevolence towards the other. For instance, one may tolerate another's annoying habits without respecting the person or the habit. — Lone Wolf

To note : a "tolerance", in French Civil Law, is an acquired right that was once challenged but recognized to have been issued in the past, and on the basis of this previous issuance, should continue being issued.

A nice little old lady has walked her dog over my yard for the last 20 years. For some reason after 20 years I start being a little whiner about it. She brings me to court, and gets herself a "Tolerance of accessibility". She can now legally walk her dog all over my property, because I had allowed her to do so in the past and nothing changed except me becoming an ass.

The immortality of the germ-line had to be physically separated from the mortality of the stem-line to achieve even basic multicellular complexity. — apokrisis

What immortality? Germ-lines can become extinct like anything else.

I was talking about the death of possibilities, the termination of development - the positive step of making the soma disposable so as to make the germ-line evolvable. — apokrisis

Well, apparently, moments ago, you were talking about structural complexity requiring controlled death. So you aren't have the most coherent of conversation, at the very least.

Organismal immortality does not prevent evolution.
Death did not evolve.
Death is not necessary for sexual reproduction, or vice-versa.

The A Contrario of these are the claims that you made in your post, and they were incorrect, and as usual you tried to deflect by writing a barely-related envolee lyrique.

I was talking about the death of possibilities, the termination of development - the positive step of making the soma disposable so as to make the germ-line evolvable.

If you want to make some more simplistic reading of what I wrote, I guess I can't stop you. — apokrisis

Bloody hell, how fucking otiose can someone be???

Wasn't that my point? Structural complexity depends on controlled death. And hydra are already complex enough for that to be a factor. — apokrisis

There is a vast different between effective waste management and wholesale regulated systematic deregulation. The first one is just a necessary feature of any physical system with an actual physical output. The second one doesn't make sense.

Again, it is an evolutionary story. If complex structure depends on controlled death, then control over that death will become increasingly a feature. — apokrisis

Controlled death is a sort of exaggeration here. Cell-suicide is not necessarily controlled. It happens all the time accidentally because you decided to smoke, to drink coffee, to expose yourself to some radiation, etc...

The point is that there is a colossal step between cell-suicide and programmed organismal death. Death may very well be virtually unavoidable for beings of our scale and complexity, but the idea that telomeres division or sexual reproduction is somehow what cursed us to death, which was popular in the early 90s and 2000s, is just going the way of the dodo.

But it is also true that hydra depend on apoptosis, or programmed cell death — apokrisis

Well, yeah, but to be fair, so does all form of complex cellular life. All cells are susceptible to cell-suicide if they are exposed to the proper stress value. And I don't think you should read too much "programmed
degradation" into it. The stress vectors which lead the cell to suicide are, notably, the same type of stress which may lead into cellular deregulation and then into cancer.

There is definitely a "cellular death management" function in all living beings. I don't think sufficient homeodynamism for anything else but the simplest vesicle could emerge without it. This doesn't mean that organismal death is itself pre-programmed.

So sex and death do go together. — apokrisis

Again, the fresh water Hydra is a sexually reproducing animal that is virtually immortal. And there are plenty of animals who'se cells show heightened morphallaxis that have more or less the same putrefaction process that we have.

If death has evolved, it has stopped evolving a long time ago, much before complex sexual reproduction was evolved.

Very cool. I wonder how it 'works'. — StreetlightX

One fact that is interesting is that most other Hydrazoa (the larger family to which the water Hydra belongs) have a latter state as a polyp. The Hydra, in comparison to other members of it's family, never reaches full maturity. It's not a larval stage, because it can reproduce sexually and asexually, but I've always wondered if the Hydra didn't "trade in" ever reaching it's maturity stage in order to keep the super-morphallaxis that it has in earlier stages.

Well, for the longest time, it was thought to be the length and substraction of the telomeres, small tubular "hair" located at the end of chromosomes, which would shrink after every cell-division. When the telomeres are too small ; no more cell-division.

The number of cell-division possible in humans is called the Hayflick limit, and stands for 40 to 60 cell-division before senescence.

I can't find many mentions of living beings with the same degree of never-ending morphallaxis as the Water Hydra, but there are quite a few animals in which the process of senescence is negligible, to a degree which makes us long-lived humans look like ephemerals. A Proteus is a form of worm/salamander that has been observed to go to 200 years old. Clams have been found to go up to 500 years old. And sharks can grow over 400 years old.

I remain sceptical. After all, germ cells are not organisms, and the reason that they don't age is that they - exactly like cancer, actually - remain undifferentiated, retaining their pluripotential so they may turn into other cells. And organisms just are differentiated beings (among other things). — StreetlightX

The Water Hydra is a little creeper that seemingly doesn't age at all. It's stem cell can apparently self-rejuvenate as needed without the cap to division that apparently affect almost all other cellular life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)

I'm considering the cases of "feral children" and how they were able to assign meaning without having any human contact. — numberjohnny5

There are no case of feral children. The few cases which have sparked the myth are about rejected youth afflicted by developmental and mental problems, which managed to survive on the outskirts of society thanks to scavenging and occasional charity.

Gun controls will not work, for many reasons. The only way to stop gun violence is to remove the guns.
There are an estimated 270,000,000 guns in the country, if it takes a dollar for each one to be picked up how much is that. Would that money not be better spent on education? Most think it would. — Sir2u

Why would a gun amnesty cut funds in education? I mean, it's not going to be free, but it certainly won't cost in the billions. How much trash is generated in a week in the U.S? If it cost 1 dollars to pick up every one of those trash bags... See where I'm going with this?

It seems the position is a form of “Ontological Relativism” or possibly “Relational Realism”. I want to explore this view, but can find little if any references to how I envision it. — noAxioms

There is already a Relational Realism at least discussed by Jonathan Cohen, and its terms are completely incompatible with your radical nihilism, being declined as "x is P for S in C".

Things exist only in relation to something (anything) else. There is no objective existence of anything, thus solving the problem of why existence exists. — noAxioms

How can a relation stand between things which do not exist? If the relation grants existence to the things, then the relation cannot follow from the things.

I think that that's the best criticism I've seen so far. It's one of those "harsh, but true" comments. — Sapientia

And to note, I kinda do agree that Philosophy courses are dominated by men (and mostly white men). In a specific way. Philosophy is like the reverse Law course. In Law, you often start with 50/50 men/women in early classes. After the second semester, tho, it becomes 40/60 men/women, and keeps increasing until you finish with graduations that are 85% women. Philosophy, in my experience, goes the other way.

And ideally, there should be a diversity of people from different cultural backgrounds and experience that interest themselves in Philosophy enough that they wish to register to a university course. And when a group becomes predominantly male and white, especially when a lot of the members of the group are socially akward, then it can become very toxic toward women, transgender and etc...

But if someone leave Philosophy because there are too many White Men, because they are too hipster, because they feel shame at what they do, then, honestly and seriously, we are the better for it. I'm 100% positive she would have been bad at it.

For me, ethics is not a motive. My motive is that I believe human beings identify as herbivores through our biology & physiology alone; regardless of how we identify through our behaviour. — XTG

Well, then, by your own premises you are definitely wrong. Biologically we are omnivorous, which should be evident by the fact that we are neither obligatory herbivores or obligatory carnivores. We are definitely not biological herbivores.

More precisely, we are biological omnivore but behaviouraly primarily granivores, because the vast majority of our food are grain based (think all the bread and cereals we eat).

Maybe Stover meant to put it in a rather provocative way. But if we bracket out the rather modern Marxist connotation of a class and rather hold to the more 'conservative' idea of a guild, tradition, art, craft, tradition of excellence, etc., — Pierre-Normand

You may be unto something. "Courtoisie" in the context given, evoke to me "bourgeoisie" and it's connotation, which may have led me too far down a certain interpretation. What Stover got 100% right, in my opinion, is how trite the general defenses of Humanities are. I do not do what I do in Philosophy to become a better person, and I would find insulting anyone who would suggest that I'm bad at Philosophy because I do not seek betterment through it.

Humanities could simply be a practice articulated around a community of individuals with common interest. I also have to say... As a philosophy student, I do not really feel that much of an attachment to the concept or tradition of Humanities. To me, the operating concept was always more "foundamental research & studies", which already dissociated itself from a baggage of Humanities courses.

Sometimes when I am asked about the value that I find in philosophy, the question takes the form 'A quoi ça sert?' (what is it useful for) and my provocative reply is that philosophy is utterly useless, which is why it's so valuable. — Pierre-Normand

That's a philosopher's answer. :razz: Not that it's a bad one. It's just the kind of answer I would try to avoid giving to someone who is already negative toward Philosophy. Rather, when asked, I simply tell people that, in a very real and very pragmatic way, without the intellectual steps taken by Aristotle back then, you wouldn't have a single piece of electronic possible today. Discoveries don't care where they come from, and don't contain themselves only to the domain that their author researched. Philosophy is indeed a sort of "creativity", like those teachers Stovers refered to said, although not to their specific meaning, because it's by far the most dry and dusty and boring form of creativity, and I like it just like that.

Thanks for uncovering that. It's a real gem — Pierre-Normand

I don't know how I feel about the idea that Humanities purpose was always to create a courtoisie class, or even that Humanities value cannot be expressed outside of an adherence to the curriculum of said Humanities. Not even that Humanities are the core of the University. The core of the University was, historically, always Law and Philosophy, with Law being given priority.

It also seems to me that, if the Academy truly wanted to create a courtoisie through the Humanities, it has failed fairly hard. There is little to no class envy toward humanities academics, after all. Even my friends will not even hesitate or feel bad about questioning the value of my work or my career. There is practically no overlap between Academic Humanities and politics, which could be expected to rise with the demarcation of a new social class, especially one so close to it.

William's piece just... ugh. :vomit:
"Why I left Academic Philosophy". "Because Men. Because the way Men Write (badly). Because I felt insignificant in comparison to BLM. Because philosophy student are arrogant hairy (Men) hipsters that nobody in their right mind would want to associate with. Because I felt shame when I told people I was studying Philosophy."

Hey, to the best of my knowledge, Akanthinos, you weren't singled out by the CIA as either a particularly tragic or unusually fine specimen of social capital. In fact, it isn't an individual issue. The kind of capital we are talking about here is social, not individual, and it isn't measured in dollars at all. — Bitter Crank

Well, it's not like I don't have already a dozen institution who'se only purpose in life is to quantify my social and national usefulness. And the distinction between the social and the individual is a red herring. You cannot dissociate the amalgam from the amalgamated, or vice-versa, simply because "it's not the issue". The issue here is the social capital that can become yet another point of pressure and conformity in a society increasingly devoted to "soft control", so to speak.

So, you, Unenlightened, and Erik don't like "social capital." What's the right word for what BC is talking about? Social values? Civic virtue? Community spirit? Quality of life? Or do you really have no idea what he is trying to get at? — T Clark

Well, think about the Social Credit Score system being put in place in China right now. Do you want to live in a world where your rights are in parts determined by how close-knit your family is? How quickly you reply to official letters? How many children you can be expected to have?

The step from simply quantifying Social Capital to ordaining society around such a score may seems dystopian, but it's the direction the world is taking.

In this case, rather, the paternalism is freaking disgusting. Why the hell should I tolerate that someone calls me "poor" in Social Capital just because I never speak to my family? Unless you've analyzed my finances, my lifestyle and my friendships, then you have no clue whatsoever.

As I said once before, or maybe several times. It is people that kill, not guns. And if people do not have access to guns they will use something else. — Sir2u

It bears repeating tho, that since bullet wounds are statistically a lot more damaging than blade wounds, even if all gun crimes were translated into knife attacks, violent crime would be about 1/3 to 2/3 less deadly, depending on the organ wounded.

There is no object though, it is an "unfocused anxiety". That is how these emotions, feelings of desire and intentionality present themselves to the conscious mind. So there is no object to be represented. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's an "unfocused" anxiety specifically because its object has not made itself fully available to consciousness yet. Through introspective works, the subject can become cognizant of the object of his unfocused anxiety. Or perhaps, again, this anxiety is really only a physical event with an affect on consciousness, and thus does not need to be described through intentionality.

If phenomenology stipulates that the conscious mind cannot apprehend anything other than objects, then perhaps you ought to consider that phenomenology doesn't accurately describe the capacities of the conscious mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok, let's try this : describe to me something of which you are conscious, in such a way that I cannot describe that something as the object of your consciousness. It'll be pretty hard. Being ineffable is not sufficient. If you are conscious of something, then it is because that something is available or constituted by your mind as an objectivity for your consciousness.

But my point is that these "feelings" do not inform conscious thought as objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, because the feeling is quite obviously not the object of the emotion. Its object is the perceived but perhaps not thematized dynamic, which reveals itself to consciousness through the feeling.

As to how theses are apprehended, at least from the point-of-view of phenomenology, it is not possible to apprehend them as anything else than objects. Their becoming available to apprehension is their constitution as objects.

This volume leaves out "La structure du comportement", unfortunately, doesn't it? — Pierre-Normand

Ah, good catch, it certainly does. In fact, I think I overstated the "complete" part quite a bit. There isn't "Cinema et la nouvelle psychologie, "Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression", "l'institution" and quite a few others.

I've got the Routledge translation here. I'm guessing you've got a French edition? — Ying

Yes, his complete works ; http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Quarto/OEuvres2

So it is quite clear that the inner feelings begin in vague generalities, not objects of representation, and the conscious mind apprehends and manipulates these generalities to produce specific objects of intention. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is not quite so clear at all. Of course you are free to subscribe to whatever theory of emotion and agency you wish to justify your theory, but I can do the same to defend representationalism against these flimsy charges. After all, you are the one who decided to locate emotions entirely within the realm of the mental. I rather see emotions and events of pain and physical pleasure as purely physical events which (may) inform conscious thought. This is the division of work that I refered jkg20 to. I don't see a need for emotions of events of pain to have an intentional object themselves, only the higher-order understanding of those events of pain or emotions must have an intentional object. And they do. The object of the fully diffused pain is simply the body as a nervous system suffering from whatever illness it is suffering from. The object of jealousy is the logic of possession which you enact despite not necessarily having realized it.

I don't remember him talking about neurosis in that text — Ying

Sorry, lost in translation. I took neurosis here to mean nevrose in French, which is just a general term for a (generaly mild) psychopathology.

M-P talks about ghost limbs and anosognosie (PP 91-96), aphasia (PP 144-156), hysteria (190) and aphony (PP 192).

Just out of curiosity, where did you stumble across "Propaedeutics"? Nice obscure word. — Bitter Crank

Couldn't answer for OP, but in the Francophone world, a propedeutic is a special course requirement that is given to students who have not completed the normal requirements but which have obtained a dispensation for x or y reason.

Hypothetical case : an Ancient History doctorate wishes to complete a Philosophy Master. Asking him his 90 credits is clearly overkill. After a few interviews with the program director, he is given a list of 5-8 courses of modern philosophy to study, after which he will be accepted at the Master level. This list of 5-8 courses is called a propedeutic.

Of course the primary source is the preferred source, go to the library and read. — Metaphysician Undercover

By God's bloody hell are you ever this trite? Obviously, primary sources are necessary. You cannot fail to fail a paper on a subject if it doesn't at the very least cite a primary source.

What's next, "Meta weights in on punctuation, should you or should you not use it in term papers?" :brow: